Rise of the Triad Review

Sometimes the AI even fails in its basic task of shooting the player. This is particularly noticeable when they perform their favourite trick, which is to nick your weapon and shoot you with it. Trouble is, they often only do the first half of this, and then just stand there clutching a ludicrously powerful weapon while you calmly blast them into the next life with your pistol. These aren't the only noticeable bugs, either. Apparently the game was put together in around eighteen months, and quite frankly you can tell. Enemies will randomly appear and disappear. It's possible to get stuck on or sometimes inside walls, and toward the end of the game textures were missing from walls and doors.

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These issues smack of amateurism, but there's another problem which can make the experience downright unpleasant. See, Rise of The Triad isn't just a game about blowing people up in incredibly gory ways, oh no, it also features frequent puzzle sections, mostly various combinations of bounce-pads, moving platforms, and deadly traps.

These would probably be the most interesting part of the game, were it not for the awful, awful checkpoints. One particularly lengthy puzzle section, consisting of a series of corridors filled with lava and fire traps, took half an hour to complete. Another, which involves jumping through a spinning cylinder made of separate floating discs, has its checkpoint placed several enemy-filled rooms beforehand, forcing you to clear them out before attempting the tricky traversal. Given this is a shooter based on speed and reflexes, the combination of fiddly puzzles and lengthy retreads only serve to interrupt the flow and supplant any thrills with frustration.

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And it isn't just these new issues which hobble the game's potential. The remake is also undone by its faithfulness to the original. The enemy roster is very limited. For the most part you're stuck shooting identikit soldiers. Meanwhile, the weapons are nearly all clumped together in the first few levels, and the two which aren't, a baseball-bat power up and a mage's wand, you don't really get to spend enough time with. Interceptor might have remade Rise of the Triad, but they seem to have made no effort to actually improve it.

At this point you're probably wondering where the "fun" mentioned earlier in this review is coming from. The answer to that is in the multiplayer. It's nothing particularly special, just classic deathmatch, team-deathmatch and capture the flag, but the speed of the game combined with its plethora of explosive weapons make for some pretty intense deathmatches reminiscent of the Quake III days. If you're a fan of twitch shooters, they don't come much twitchier than Rise of The Triad.

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Rise of the Triad isn't a complete disaster. Interceptor have captured the feel of the classic FPS well enough, and the multiplayer is decent if derivative. But the single-player simply has too many problems - both issues carried over from the original and new mistakes caused by a rushed development - to make it worthy of recommendation.